January 25, 2013
The annual International Film Festival at Shawnee State University has four top movies from different countries that will be shown in the Flohr Lecture Hall at Clark Memorial Library on campus. All the shows and refreshments are free and open to the public.
The movies begin on Tuesday, Jan. 29 with a movie from Germany "The Ninth Day" with Thomas Piontek, Ph.D. assistant professor in English and Humanities at SSU as host. The movie is set inside the hell of the Dachau concentration camp "Priest Block." A Gestapo officer arranges a nine-day reprieve for a priest and offers him freedom if he will bow down to Nazi occupation.
On Wednesday, Jan. 30, a Thailand movie "The Overture" will be shown with international student Calvin Lye as host. Sorn, a gifted musical prodigy, longs to compete in a musical competition pitting Thailand's late 19th century ranard-ek players against one another. But when rival musicians murder his older brother, Sorn's family forbids the young performer from ever playing again. Beseeching his parents to let him carry on for his fallen brother while surreptitiously studying on his own, Sorn fights to balance his all-consuming need to win with his responsibility to the traditions and loyalties he has promised to uphold.
On Thursday, Jan. 31 a movie from Brazil "Hour of the Star" will be shown with international student Thomas Carbonari as host. Centered on a native immigrant woman, this striking adaptation of the canonical novel by Clarice Lispector tracks the tragicomic ordeals of Macabéa (Marcelia Cartaxo) during her first days in the megalopolis of Sao Paulo – after emigrating from the impoverished north of Brazil.
The last film "City of Life and Death" from China will be shown on Friday, Feb. 1 with Teacher Education Professor Xiaodan Huang, Ph.D. as host. Director Lu Chuan (Mountain Patrol) based the film on the recorded witness testimony from the real-life survivors of a massacre, meticulously recreating the infamous reign of terror conducted by the occupying Japanese army in the Chinese capital of Nanking in 1937. The first big-budget fiction film by the Chinese to deal with this seminal event, the movie paints an epic portrait of wartime conflict, filled with an ensemble of conflicted characters.
Complimentary refreshments from each country will be served each evening with Berlinger, decaf coffee and European hot chocolate from Germany; tofu, Thai peanuts and ginger tea from Thailand; Brigadeiro, cheese puffs and Brazilian lemonade from Brazil; and wontons and hot tea from China.